Hoberman penned a famous essay entitled “Vulgar Modernism.” In it, he pointed out that medium-specific reflexivity-the use of “art to call attention to art” that Clement Greenberg proposed as the defining feature of modernist painting-was, in fact, everywhere in American mass culture in the 1940s and 1950s. In 1982, longtime Village Voice film critic J. Time has proved her to be an exceptionally good predictor of the future, meaning that reading her twenty-year old Hamlet on the Holodeck is a surprisingly exciting experience.Ĭontinue reading → Pedagogy & Lesson Plans, Posts by Ian Andrew Stern, Celia Pearce, digital storytelling, Espen Aarseth, Façade, Frames Claims and Videogames, HER STORY, interactive fiction, Janet Murray, Michael Mateas, narrative, Night School Studio, Oxenfree, Sam Barlow Misty-eyed Modernism As a consolation, though, it is a delight teaching Janet Murray. (Is it really any wonder that this burgeoning culture of alt-right gamer trolls would evolve into one of Donald Trump’s key blocks of support?)Īs I said, it is tough re-reading, let alone teaching, the ludologists in 2017. The most vigilant among these enforcement agents, the Joe Arpaios of gamer culture, enjoyed a wide jurisdiction and acted at their own discretion, with great impunity. A “videogame” became a medium you couldn’t freely pass into until you showed your papers, and proved that everything was in order. These young men took it upon themselves to politicize the term game, to define its boundaries and beef up its border security. I mean the angry young men, who would later become Gamergate, but who already, in 2012–2013, were barking back at “corrupt” journalists praising games they didn’t see as games: games that told stories, rather than let you shoot things.
And not the snarky, tongue-in-cheek Game Police parody twitter account that arose in 2013. Looking back at the early-2000s era writing of folks like Espen Aarseth and Markku Eskelinen, it’s pretty clear that they were the academic precursors of the game police. When prepping for this lesson, I found re-reading the ludologists in 2017 to be an unpleasant experience. For the first academic debate, I pitted Janet Murray‘s ideas about the storytelling potentials of new media agains the hard-core ludologists. Some of these are legal, some have occurred in the art world, some have occurred in the sphere of popular discourse, and others are academic. The first half of my “ Frames, Claims, and Videogames” course is devoted to five major debates that have hovered around games over the past couple of decades. Here are a few of my highest recommendations.Ĭontinue reading → Critical Musings, Posts by Ian Campo Santo, DONTNOD Entertainment, Firewatch, Games of the Decade: 2007-2017, genDESIGN, Gone Home, Heavy Rain, indie games, Jonas Kyratzes, Life Is Strange, Night School Studio, Oxenfree, Quantic Dream, Team ICO, The Fullbright Company, The Last Guardian, The Sea Will Claim Everything, Verena Kyratzes Lesson Plan: Janet Murray, Damn Fine Futurist The past decade has been awash in sharply-penned dialogue, superb voice acting, and richly emotional character beats. I am happy to report that developers have risen to the challenge. In the wake of GLaDOS, though, the ante has been upped. The 1990s and early 2000s are filled with RPGs and adventure games with memorable characters, even as they might struggle to recount their stories efficiently. If I am being perfectly fair, games have historically struggled less with characters than they have with pacing. But it’s not unrealistic to ask for characters with interesting personalities and motivations. Creating characters as good as the ones listed above, in any medium, is probably an unrealistic goal.
Defending games as a potential storytelling medium seemed like a silly project, as the games stories had opted to tell just simply weren’t very good. Much like yesterday’s category, today’s sub-list is partially a lament that baseline competency in storytelling seemed so long unachievable in games.